AuthorTopic: "Leader of those armies bright"  (Read 11447 times)

Offline ndchristie

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"Leader of those armies bright"

on: June 29, 2006, 05:42:58 am
5 points if you can name the poem the line is from
2 more points if you can name the author
3 more points if you can name the popular television show that once featured a place by the same naem as the poem
5 points if, at any point during the poem, even just for a moment, particularly in book one, you took pity on Satan

and now, for the actual pic! :P



tried to see what i could do with 5 colors, and im actually pretty happy with how it turned out.  any crits would be greatly appreciated, though it already took me two hours and hes not the prettyiest of people

note: originally planned to have beelzebub behind him, since he is the one that actually says the line, but it didnt fit well unless i moved satan over and i didnt want to.  does it hurt the composition not to have beelzebub there and satan smack dab in the middle? probably.  if people want him there i might do a second version.

general position and lighting of the lord of the flies :


what do y'all think?
« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 05:48:16 am by Adarias »
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Offline Ryumaru

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #1 on: June 29, 2006, 06:01:10 am
easily my favorite of your works , adarias.

to me, it all just works.
im speechless.

Offline Sohashu

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #2 on: June 29, 2006, 06:03:44 am
Isnt beezlebub satan, as it translates to lord of the flies, which is taken to mean Lord of decay.  But oh well.  The wings dont seem to be for flying of any sort, I probably expect a membrane. 
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Offline Ryumaru

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #3 on: June 29, 2006, 06:14:38 am
actually him in the center would create a triangle:

which unless im mistaken is a good compositional shape especially for a religous figure.(even if it is satan)

Offline InvaderLupus

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #4 on: June 29, 2006, 06:27:49 am
it's an excellent piece. I didn't recognize the line, so I did a quick google search. Now I think I might actually read the poem; it seems very interesting and very much like the kind of thing I enjoy reading.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #5 on: June 29, 2006, 06:38:25 am
Sohashu : beelzebub is either satan himeslf, or, in the case of the poem, a lesser devil.  As the wings go, they would be of ok size if he was like a bat and ended where they met the tailbone, but since hes quite large thers no way hed get any lift out of them.  i experimented with bigger wings, but found that the non-functioning sort looks best to me.  im not even sure if he could spread the ones hes got the way they are drawn.  if you have any suggestions im open to them

ryumaru : thats a great point, and i was hesitant to extend the picture, but seeing how well it works might just motivate me to do it.  i wonder though, how will i make 2 characters into 3 compositionally......did i mention that this piece was heavily inspired by your Gabriel pieces?

Invader : i actually hate the poem, but if you like it then thats cool :P

Nobody knows the answers without looking them up? i thought everyone read / had to read it at some point in their life.
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Offline Darien

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #6 on: June 29, 2006, 06:44:03 am
Paradise Lost, John Milton, your last clue gives it away (or just the fact that it's about Satan).  I never read it, I think we ran out of time for it in school or soemthing.


I don't really have any serious crits on this, though I really like it, it's certainly different from your usual game arty stuff, nice to see once in a while.  Very moody.  I think I prefer the Satan alone.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 06:46:26 am by Darien »

Offline Ryumaru

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #7 on: June 29, 2006, 06:47:09 am
did i mention that this piece was heavily inspired by your Gabriel pieces?
Nobody knows the answers without looking them up? i thought everyone read / had to read it at some point in their life.
you have no idea how awesome that makes me feel  :)

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #8 on: June 29, 2006, 06:49:00 am
Paradise Lost, John Milton, your last clue gives it away.  I never read it, I think we ran out of time for it in school or soemthing.

7 points to Darien :P
and thats a good point about the clue, how many poems about satan have multiple books?

I really like it, it's certainly different from your usual game arty stuff, nice to see once in a while.

thanks, and yeah, i was working on characters and tiles for so long (which explains why i havent been posting new stuff, none of it is particularly exciting) i felt i needed to try something totally different to livin things up at my desk :P
A mistake is a mistake.
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Offline st0ven

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #9 on: June 29, 2006, 07:04:59 am


i wanted to play with the colors really fast. Incidentally, im actually a bit surprised, given your style of color choices in the past, that you didnt go with a green ambience rather than the blue that you chose. i feel that blue+red = cold and hot kindof 'fire and ice' thing that seems a bit ehh... over dramatic?.

I think its a cool study, i like the grittiness of the piece, i can tell you did it in a relatively fast amount of time... if you were to go ahead and take this piece further, i think you could go ahead and start creating dithered shades to weave some more subtle detail, particularly into the cloudy/misty environment (as i think it would give a bit of texture to the atmosphere and make some of the color shifts smoother).

I couldnt exactly follow what was going on with his face... and while its kindof a cool effect, its also kindof frustrating not to be able to really discern how grotesque his facial features are, perhaps that creates more tension in the pic, or perhaps it creates frustration, i dont know. also, im not really following the shape of the leg on the right. the ambience on the left leg makes it a lot easier to pick out the muscular structure of that leg, but the one on the right seems kindof benign in comparison (ok now im officially using words completely out of logical context, moreso than usual!). The wings look sexeh, but the straightness that the wings have while drooping down sorta seems just too... well, vertical. id like to see the wing on the left curve a bit more to match the symmetry of that on the right (in proper perspective of course).

delicious otherwise... well actually i think the font is not as legible as it could be but that doesnt really seem part of the artful part of the piece.

i think referencing helm's 4 color piece would do well to gather ideas as to how to go about adding more detail to this piece, if you decide that is what you want to do.

*edit*   upon further examination, adarias, i think your colors are, unsurprisingly, much more adarias-like than mine, bahahah. hope you dont mind the variation though :)
« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 07:25:04 am by st0ven »

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #10 on: June 29, 2006, 07:35:08 am
cool edit stoven, subtle and powerful, makes me think of like and old illustration or oil painting.....maybe a Devil tarot.  color choices came out this way for no other reason than i liked how it looked :P

while its true that i didnt spend a huge amount of time on this, and it was aready late at night when i began, i purposefully shose not to dither it, because i dont like dithering or the texture it creates.  i like your edit though, maybe enough to try some dithering....i dont know

originally his entire face was lit up, but i decided that it really didnt fit the character. i decided to obscure it mostly to create an air of mystery, even deception, hopefully this is the frustration that you mean?.  you look straight at his face, but can you actually see him clearly,  he is the devil afterall, you 'see' him all the time and fail yet to actually see him clearly.   hopefully you can still pick out the glittering eyes, broken nose, eye-bags, and loose, scarred flesh.  if not, i may need to rework  :o


im thinking i may nix the text since im one of the few that can read it and that's because i already know what it says :P that and people say its distracting

by the way, is anyone familiar enough with biblical stories to tell me if satan should or should not have a penis? or nipples, shoudl i choose t uncross his arms?  i didnt think that angels had features of that sort, but the idea of the black sabbath would suggest otherwise.  Perhaps the simple posession of genetalia is an indication of sin?
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Offline Cure

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #11 on: June 29, 2006, 08:03:33 am
Great piece, love your style and all your work.  To answer your question, I would imagine angels have genitalia, as they mated with human women to produce the nephilim.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #12 on: June 29, 2006, 08:24:19 am
Great piece, love your style and all your work.  To answer your question, I would imagine angels have genitalia, as they mated with human women to produce the nephilim.
thanks :P

off topic:
so it sounds like the posession of genitalia is directly related to sin, if only the fallen seem to have it.  i suppose that makes sense, and goes along with the Original Sin (i mean, the 'fruit of knowledge', for all the kiddies in the room)
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Offline Sohashu

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #13 on: June 29, 2006, 09:22:40 am
I suppose so.  I mean look at incubus's.  Thats is their purpose. :P

BUt on the subject of wing, I think having them originate from the shoulder and having the membrane connected to the hip would make them fuctional.  at the moment the bone appears to come from the hip, and it looks like it would result in a lot of strange muscle.

Have beezlebub in one corner and some sort of beast in the other.  His right and left hand man :P 
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Offline CrumbBread

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #14 on: June 29, 2006, 01:20:45 pm
Regarding the whole Original Sin thing, bear in mind that humans were created with genitalia while they were still sinless. And Jesus, being sinless, still had normal human anatomy owing to the fact that he was fully human.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that God created sex and approves of it wholeheartedly ^_^ (it is just, for a variety of reasons, only right and good in certain circumstances)

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That doesn't really help you with your picture, but I didn't want the inaccurate perception to continue unquestioned.

Offline Turbo

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #15 on: June 29, 2006, 02:52:37 pm
It's very nice! I quite like the rough lighting interaction on his silhouette, the anatomy, and the shading. The strong lighting contrast on the top makes it hard to distinguish the details on the obscured part: i suggest raising the contrast on the dark colors just a tad, keeping the penumbra effect but making it a tad more readable.
The main problem is that i don't read his face at all: looks to me like he took a shotgun discharge to the face. I can't tell if he's facing forward or has his head twisted to his left. Are those pointy things horns or ears, and where are they coming from?  I see two birght shapes that could be his eyes, but they're not located where i interpret the eyes should be. Is the head tilted?

Composition wise, i'd nudge him a few pixels right, so that the wing on the left was aligned with the left vertical third of the picture, keeping the right wing still inside the frame.

|-------|
|  |   |  |
|  |   |  |
|-------|
  /\
   |
left wing aligned here

Since his body is 99.5 similar to human, every muscle and bone so alike us, i think you owe the viewer some genitalia. Otherwise it's a PC cop-out. And who's not sick and tired of PC? I know i am!

Hope that helps.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 02:56:53 pm by Turbo »

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #16 on: June 29, 2006, 04:15:12 pm
thanks for the crits, adn thats a good point about the composition

im having difficulty coming up with proper contrast, since i meant for him to be on a black field instead of a light one, and if i make the colors brighter so that the eye can see better on the bright field, then it looks completey out of whack on its native black field

as far as the head goes, its tilted down slightly, and angled just a bit to his left so that its a little closer to straight-on than the body.
if you follow the blue on the horns (they are horns) down from the point, youll find that they originate from the brow a little above the eye socket. the pointy shape next to his left our right eye is his ear, adn the other one sticks out slightly, you can see part of it behind the horn.  the bright spots are his eyes as per milton's description, and i tihnk they look to be in about the right spot for the angle, but im not portrait artist

and yeah, hes definately got a penis there, i just wasnt sure if i should remove it.  im not a fan of PC, but im also not a fan of getting a detail wrong >.<
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Offline Sereth

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #17 on: June 29, 2006, 04:50:13 pm
I like it but at first I thought the wings were his arms and was confused.
But after looking for a few seconds I realized my mistake.

Offline Turbo

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #18 on: June 29, 2006, 05:09:42 pm
I wanted to have some fun with it, so i did:



Added some more defined human features. This is assuming that his face has such features, it could be similar to minced meat in the original which i'm not familiar with. But just by adding a chin line, it improved a lot.
Also played with his wee-wee a bit, added a bit more definition, and a hint of sack.

Yeah, that stuff about the colors, i forgot you were going for low color count and that you were heavily reusing them on the background. Disregard that advice now :)

Edit: after messing a bit with the colors (not on the edit), i'm convinced you can improve it by upping the brightness of the darkest ones (the bg does get brighter, but the figure details aren't lost in the contrast battle between the bright spots and the dark ones as they are now).
« Last Edit: June 29, 2006, 05:18:49 pm by Turbo »

Offline ndchristie

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #19 on: June 29, 2006, 06:15:10 pm
turbo : thanks for taking the time to edit, and i can understnad why you consider it to be better, but like i said before i had real reasons for making the face the way i did.  yours has a clarity and cleanness and wholeness about the face that i specifically tried to avoid.

are you sure about te contrast?  when i say field, i dont mean the background of the image, i mean the window outside them image.  heres how he was intended to be shown:

http://www.geocities.com/donteatbadgers//Satan.html

and i still tihnk that upping the brightness really detracts from him in that view

btw playing with satan's wee-wee sounds akward, though i have a sudden urge to go buy nintendo products
A mistake is a mistake.
The same mistake twice is a bad habit.
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Offline Tremulant

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #20 on: June 29, 2006, 09:01:34 pm
I really love this. Subject matter, palette, design, all of it. Subsequently, I'm blinded to any real points worth critting art wise. Compositionally speaking though, specifically, regarding the addition of Beelzebub, I'd say don't do it, personally. Despite the fact that the title is a line spoken by him, I don't think his inclusion is necessarry, or contextually relevant. Far as I remember this line comes before Lucifer is 'fully fallen' (and he still retains some of his former glory, his beauty), and you've depicted him here as the later, uglier Satan.

Dunno, I am probably just rambling, but I'd say, at the very least, you already have a pretty solid composition going on here. I would take the title as a title, and not bother with the lord of the flies, unless, of course, you just want to pixel him for the hell of it, in which case I say go for it. If your only reasoning is that 'he says it', though... yeah.

Offline Rerg1

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Re: "Leader of those armies bright"

Reply #21 on: June 30, 2006, 10:40:13 am
I love the colour choices. I didn't find anything wrong at it until I zoomed it out.

When the Wing joins to the body it gave it a feminish stance so I decided to seperate it by doing a dotted outline of the Loomy black.

I played around with the face and the center of the body and arms. The arms werent in the position of the light source because the wing blacked it out so thats the thick strip there :P.